Note: This story is more than 3 years old.

The new border: Illegal immigration's shifting frontier

TUXTLA GUTIÉRREZ, Mexico — Oscar and Jennifer Cruz knew that crossing the border would be the easy part.

The Salvadoran brother and sister made their way over the international
line between Guatemala and Mexico with the help of a smuggler who guided
them through the jungle. But soon afterward, Mexican immigration
officers arrested the clean-cut teenagers on a bus in Tuxtla Gutiérrez,
the capital of the southernmost Mexican state, Chiapas.

Like many other Central American youths who migrate on their own, Oscar,
16, and Jennifer, 13, were pushed by the danger of street gangs and
pulled by hopes of joining their parents, who left El Salvador when
their children were very young and settled in Las Vegas. The brother and
sister embarked on the trek to the United States despite the horror
stories about migrants getting robbed, raped, kidnapped or killed in
transit across Mexico.

"We wanted to be with my parents," Oscar, a devout Christian, said in an
interview at a detention center. "And there was also the threat from
the gangs. Once I started high school, they tried to recruit me. What
worried me most were the threats. The gangs fight for turf, do
extortion, threaten families and deal drugs. The police are scared of
them — kids my age."

Oscar and Jennifer crossed a lawless, long-neglected border between
Guatemala and Mexico, a 540-mile boundary snaking through mountains,
jungles and rivers. It is a hotbed of threats: smuggling of people,
drugs, arms and cash; abuse of migrants by criminals and security
forces; violence and corruption that menace institutions and create
fertile turf for mafias.

The border is also a window into the future. Profound shifts in
economics, demographics and crime are transforming immigration patterns
and causing upheaval in Central and North America. After decades in
which Mexicans dominated illegal immigration to the United States, the
overall number of immigrants has dropped and the profile has changed.

Although Mexicans remain the largest group, U.S.-bound migrants today
are increasingly likely to be young Central Americans fleeing violence
as well as poverty, or migrants from remote locales such as India and
Africa who pay top smuggling fees. They journey through a gantlet of
predators.

Mexico's southern frontier has become a national security concern for
U.S., Mexican and Central American leaders. Interviews with U.S. and
Mexican government officials, human rights advocates and migrants by a
ProPublica reporter visiting the border showed how these converging
trends are raising alarms.

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"It is becoming imperative and urgent to immediately initiate and
develop in the next few years a serious and coordinated regional
strategic plan in the areas of security, control and development to
prevent this border from sliding out of control and generating an
experience with enormous gravity for the region," said Gustavo Mohar, a
veteran immigration and intelligence official who ended his tenure last
week as Mexico's interior sub-secretary for migration issues.

"The same way that it took the United States 30 years to reach a point
of physical control on its border, Mexico needs a medium-range
strategy," Mohar said. "But we will control it better with a strategic
vision that part of the problem is Central American poverty and the drug
trade."

The new Mexican administration of President Enrique Peña Nieto inherits
repercussions of the transformation at the better-known, aggressively
policed U.S.-Mexico border. Although the U.S. political debate often
gives a contrary impression, illegal crossing at Mexico's northern
border has plummeted.

Until 2007, the U.S. Border Patrol made an average of about 1 million
arrests a year at the line, the overwhelming majority of them Mexicans.
But there has been a marked decline since. Patrol statistics through
July indicate U.S. agents made about 355,000 apprehensions at the border
in the fiscal year that ended in September. An expected figure of about
260,000 arrests of Mexicans would be the lowest in more than a decade.

Caught at the border

Nationality of immigrants crossing from Mexico to the United States.

Smuggling of people and drugs, especially marijuana, persists across the
U.S.-Mexican border. But the changes seem dramatic. In April, a landmark study by the Pew Hispanic Center
in Washington, D.C., determined that, after accounting for Mexican
immigrants who return to their homeland, the net in-flow of Mexicans to
the United States has dropped to zero. The reasons include tougher
defenses, stepped-up deportations, a long-term decline in Mexican birth
rates and the simultaneous slump in the U.S. economy and growth of the
Mexican economy.

Even if the U.S. economy improves, the demographic and economic
evolution of Mexico appears to have ended the era of massive Mexican
migration to the United States, according to experts and officials.

"Everybody agrees there's going to be some vacillation in the numbers,
but I don't know of any serious observer or analyst who thinks we are
going to revert to pre-2008 levels of Mexican immigration," said Doris
Meissner, a former U.S. immigration commissioner and now a senior fellow
at the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. "I don't see any
evidence of that happening, not in the structural changes in Mexico such
as birth rates, not in the enforcement at the border, and not in the
forecasts of what kind of economy is to come in the United States."

For years, non-Mexicans have accounted for only a small fraction of U.S.
border arrests. The proportion has changed, however, and Central
American migration has surged during the past year. Statistics indicate
that U.S. agents caught at least 90,000 non-Mexicans at the U.S-Mexico
border in the fiscal year, the great majority of them Central American.
The number almost doubles the previous year's tally and equals more than
a third of the arrests of Mexicans.

The non-Mexicans include a subset of migrants from Asia, Africa, South
America and the Caribbean. The relative numbers are small, but the
smugglers are especially powerful because they charge up to $65,000 per
client. Drug mafias have muscled in on the human smuggling trade. And
U.S. counterterrorism officials worry that corruption and disorder could
enable terrorists or foreign agents to use the region as a gateway to
the United States or a base for plots.

Apprehensions of Central American immigrants in the U.S.

Still, most non-Mexican migrants today come from three small and poor
nations: Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala. U.S. Border Patrol
apprehensions of Hondurans rose from 12,197 in fiscal 2011 to 27,734
through August; Salvadorans from 10,471 to 20,041; and Guatemalans from
19,061 to 32,486.

Mexican authorities this year have detained 40,971 illegal immigrants,
most of them Central Americans, a rise of about 15,000 during the past
two years, according to the Mexican National Institute of Migration,
that country's immigration service. Detentions of unaccompanied Central
American minors also increased, Mexican officials said.

The motivations are not just economic. El Salvador and Honduras have the
highest homicide rates in the world; Guatemala is extremely violent.
Ingrained inequality, migration and strife devastate family structures
and state institutions. Crime generates a conflict-driven migration that
recalls the refugee exodus from the region's civil wars in the 1980s.

"They are expelled from their countries by fear," said Father Flor Maria
Rigoni, a cerebral, bearded Italian priest who directs the Casa del
Migrante shelter in Tapachula on the southwest corner of the
Mexico-Guatemala border. "They are seeking the possibility to survive.
The violence there drives them. The migrants don't talk about the
economic situation of the U.S. — they just bet on the future."

Central American street gangs have become formidable transnational
mafias active in the United States and allied with Mexico's powerful
drug cartels, which are expanding in Central America. Half the cocaine
headed for the United States is off-loaded at the coast of Honduras,
according to intelligence reports cited by U.S. officials.

For all those reasons, the southern border of Mexico is becoming a
priority for security officials in Washington as well as Mexico City.

"We must continue to work together to prevent illegal flows of drugs,
migrants, contraband, weapons and stolen goods across shared land
borders," Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told Central
American leaders at a conference in Panama in February. Her visit was
part of a push by the Obama administration to beef up security, train
border forces and improve regional cooperation.

The current immigration debate in Washington should be based on a
realization that both the United States and Mexico are dealing with a
new reality at their borders, officials and experts said.

"Changing demographics in Mexico make this situation a 'new normal' with
profound implications for our southwest border," said a senior U.S.
official who monitors Mexico and Central America and requested anonymity
because he is not authorized to speak publicly. "This means that any
demand for labor in the United States in the mid to long term would be
met by other than Mexicans, at the outset principally by Central
Americans. Proposals to reform our immigration laws should take that
into account."

Peña Nieto met with Napolitano and President Obama in Washington last
week. The Mexican president's advisers have announced plans to beef up
defenses at Mexico's southern boundary and create an entity whose
existence would reflect how much times have changed: a Mexican border
patrol.

Zip-line across the river

The westernmost Mexican port of entry at the town of Suchiate accounts
for 95 percent of Mexico's commercial traffic with Central America, most
of it southbound exports. Soldiers, police officers and security guards
watch the parade of northbound legal crossers on foot, bikes,
motorcycles and vehicles on the bridge over the Suchiate River, which
demarcates the international line.

Illicit activity is not hard to spot. Riverbank commerce thrives beneath
the hot sun. Authorities do not interfere with rafts gliding back and
forth between Suchiate and the Guatemalan town of Tecun Uman, where a
swan perches on a rooftop and garbage is piled high beneath the border
bridge. Gasoline and food products are smuggled south because they are
cheaper in Mexico; people and drugs go north.

About 50 miles northeast, colorful ceramic tiles dot the walkways of the
modern port of entry between Talismán, Mexico, and El Carmen,
Guatemala. A youthful canine officer screening trucks for Mexican
customs is sharp, trim and presentable; he was trained by U.S. border
inspectors in El Paso.

But here too, smuggling takes place at high noon in plain sight. Beneath
the border bridge on the Guatemalan side, smugglers charge illegal
immigrants $1.50 to cross the narrow, fast-moving river on a raft made
of giant black inner tubes with a plank lashed on top. The shirtless
smugglers can be seen swimming behind the rafts, pushing migrants and
luggage to the Mexican riverbank, where the crossers hurry into the
underbrush.

Another option: the aerial route. Smugglers string tightrope-like cables
between trees or buildings on the riverbanks within yards of the port
of entry. Illegal crossers whiz north above the water on these makeshift
international zip lines, unmolested.

Mexican authorities do little enforcement on the riverbank. Officials
say it would disrupt a deep-rooted transborder economy and culture.
Moreover, a front-line crackdown would require a large contingent of
specialized law enforcement personnel and other defenses. That has not
been feasible given budget constraints, political sensitivities about
immigration, and the demands of the fight against drug mafias elsewhere,
officials say.

Instead, Mexico's immigration service deploys patrols in strategic spots
a few miles from the border. A major chokepoint: the rail yards of
Arriaga, where illegal immigrants race their pursuers in hopes of
hopping a freight train and making the clandestine trek across Mexico to
the U.S. border.

Known as La Bestia (The Beast), the freight train is a magnet for
predators. The dangers have been documented in accounts such as the book
"Enrique's Journey" and the documentary "María en Tierra de Nadie"
("María in No-Man's-Land"). Smugglers, bandits and corrupt security
forces swarm the rail line. Accidents kill or maim scores of riders who
fall off trains or are run over.

"The chiefs give the green light to new recruits to do their business on
the train," said Father Rigoni of the Casa del Migrante shelter. "They
monitor the recruits in their ability in their turf to handle logistics,
strategy, organization. They are applying market policy. The Zetas
choose a little gang in Tapachula: If you can prove you control the
turf, and pay us $500,000, you can rely on us for military support."

Gangsters shake down smugglers and subject migrants to robbery, rape and
extortion. They kidnap them and demand money from relatives back home
or in the United States. Women and children are forced into sexual
slavery. Detention centers and migrant refuges brim over with horror
stories.

An increase in young migrants traveling alone comes after years in which
Central American migration fluctuated: It peaked in 2005 and declined
for a few years before the new increase, which analysts see as a result
of lawlessness as well as deprivation. This year, the Casa del Migrante
has housed more than 5,000 migrants in transit; the number of Hondurans
seeking refuge this year increased 57 percent, and the number of minors
jumped 82 percent.

Father Rigoni called them "lambs to the slaughter." That phrase comes to
the mind listening to the account of Oscar and Jennifer Cruz, the
teenage Salvadoran brother and sister who told their story at the
detention center in Tuxtla Gutiérrez.

Oscar, who has a stylish haircut and new red gym shoes, aspires to work
in a bank someday. Jennifer — quiet, polite, wide-eyed — wants to be a
secretary. Their parents left the town of Usulutan when the children
were small. The parents found jobs in Las Vegas, sending back enough
money for grandparents to raise Oscar and Jennifer. Divided families
like this are typical in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala. Jennifer
said she knows her parents through "Skype, Facebook and the telephone."

Oscar and Jennifer decided to leave when the pressure from street gangs
got too intense for Oscar at school. The family pooled resources to pay
smugglers $10,000 for the trip; the parents insisted the youths travel
in Mexico by bus, not The Beast. The dangers of home and the lure of the
north overcame their fears. They made it across Guatemala unscathed,
but were caught on a bus soon after crossing the line into Mexico.

"Relying on our faith, we decided to do it," Oscar said. "It was
exciting and scary. I have two friends from school who left for the
United States. Their brothers were already there. My friends didn't make
it. They disappeared."

Abuse of migrants, especially Central Americans, is widespread and often
involves corrupt officials. Hard numbers documenting the crimes remain
elusive, however. In a study in 2010, Amnesty International asserted
that hundreds of migrants go missing or are killed
in Mexico each year. A Salvadoran advocate group quoted in the study
said that 293 Salvadorans had died or disappeared in Mexico between 2007
and 2009.

Last year, a report by Mexico's National Human Rights Commission found
that 11,333 migrants had been victims of kidnapping during a six-month
period in 2011. Some officials and human rights defenders think that
figure is too high. They cite the difficulty of gathering accurate data
and the ambiguity of kidnapping, which can result from a voluntary deal
with a smuggler that degenerates. But human rights advocates and Mexican
and Central American officials agree about the dire plight of the
border-crossers.

The gang members and other criminals who prey on migrants are sometimes
fellow Central Americans. The fast growth of the Zetas has created a
demand for foot soldiers that is filled partly by young Central
Americans in states such as Zacatecas, according to U.S. and Mexican law
enforcement officials. A Honduran ex-convict was among a group of Zetas
gunmen who killed a U.S. agent of Immigration and Customs Enforcement
in a highway ambush in central Mexico last year. Massacres in northern
Mexico have been triggered by incidents in which Mexican drug
traffickers tried to recruit groups of migrants as mules or henchmen,
U.S. and Mexican officials say.

There is another Beast. The rail hub at Palenque, 200 miles to the
northeast of Arriaga, also attracts border-crossers. Authorities
estimate that up to 500 clandestine passengers ride each freight train
coming out of Palenque. The game is played differently, however.

On a sweaty afternoon, hundreds of migrants fill the tumbledown Palenque
neighborhood of Colonia Pakal-Na. They wear caps, bandannas, shirts as
headdresses. Unconcerned by police driving by, the men panhandle, rest
in the shade and talk on cellphones near train tracks strewn with trash.
Handwritten signs in the windows of low-slung, multicolored stores and
houses announce the use of bathrooms for a fee. Clothes hang in the
chain-link fence of a basketball court dotted with sleeping figures. El
Sabor Hondureño, a Honduran-owned diner a few yards from
graffiti-covered freight cars, does a brisk business.

"They drink and take drugs and bother people coming through the area;
there have even been victims of assaults," says José López, an official
in Palenque City Hall, sounding not unlike U.S. residents complaining
about immigrant laborers in their neighborhoods. "There is the problem
of gang fights among them. There are no bathrooms where they can do
their necessities, so they go in the open areas. They are rejected by
the residents of the neighborhood."

Mexican immigration officials say their hands are tied. They conduct
occasional raids. Were they to arrest migrants on a daily basis,
officials say, they would have to transport them to Tapachula to be
repatriated by bus. Resources are lacking.

Detainees cannot simply be deported south from Palenque because
Guatemalan authorities cannot ensure safe passage through the jungles of
the Petén region, an outpost of drug traffickers. As at the U.S.-Mexico
border, the asymmetry between Mexico and Central America is dramatic.

"We cannot ask the Guatemalan government to control its border to
prevent people from crossing when it is battling to maintain national
stability and programs of development, education, rebuilding police and
intelligence to fight gangs and drug trafficking," Mohar said. "For
Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, the departure of their citizens has
historically brought remittances that are fundamental to their
economies. This has been also true for Mexico, but fortunately less and
less today. The Central American countries don't have an incentive to do
something at the border. But I'm afraid if they don't, and if we don't
work with them, the problem will overwhelm us."

A study released recently
by the Migration Policy Institute in Washington found that borders are
"porous and uncontrolled" throughout Central America. Only four of the
eight official crossing points between Mexico and Guatemala operate
regularly, and secret landing strips for drug smuggling planes
proliferate, according to the study. Border security suffers from the
ills afflicting overall security, according to the study: insufficient
resources, weak institutions, corruption and lack of continuity between
administrations.

"Guatemala has not had a coherent border security strategy or policy for
the last four years," the study states. "The government has ordered
increases in police and military personnel sent to the border without
providing these forces any new resources. As a result, these border
build-ups have been short-lived."

It is harder than ever to sneak across the U.S.-Mexico border. As a result, Mexican officials detect a new trend.

"What we have in the last six months is a very significant increase in
the flow of Central Americans who are not going to the U.S. but rather
to stay in Mexico," Mohar said. He cites a presence of immigrants in the
states of San Luis Potosí, Jalisco and Querétaro and "an enormous
challenge with Central American children traveling alone who stay in
Mexico City and live on the streets and are very vulnerable to joining
gangs or being trafficked."

Smugglers adapt and thrive

Market conditions — namely, the likelihood of getting caught — dictated
the deal that the smugglers made with Marco, an Ecuadoran who wanted to
go to United States with his wife.

"The fee I paid included three attempts," said Marco, who asked that his
full name be withheld for his safety. "This was my first try. I paid
for a package. And if I don't want to keep trying, they said they will
reimburse me 50 percent."

Marco is a compact 26-year-old with buzz-cut hair and a bemused
expression. He was interviewed at the detention center in Tuxtla
Gutiérrez while he awaited deportation after his arrest for crossing
from Guatemala. He had hoped to reach New York, where his brother had
spent six years working in construction, returned to their hometown of
Azogues and bought himself a house and a pickup truck.

The Ecuadoran smugglers dealt with Marco almost exclusively by phone, he
said. They charged $11,000, collecting a $3,000 down payment. Marco and
his wife packed coats and hats because they were told they would spend
four days walking through the desert with a group to enter the United
States. They prayed at a shrine and set off, armed with a phone number
and a password, to a hotel in Guayaquil. A woman facilitator gave them a
new number and password and plane tickets to San Pedro Sula, Honduras,
via Panama.

The couple took a bus from Honduras to Guatemala City. Local smugglers
took charge of them. Marco and his wife slept in a safe house where the
clients came from as far away as China. After another bus ride, they
spent two days by mototaxi and on foot entering Mexico through the
mountains. The group of Ecuadorans and Guatemalans, using the code name
"Eagles," met a Mexican smuggler known as Chiclet at a cheap hotel in
picturesque San Cristóbal de las Casas, according to Marco's account.

In Ecuador, the smugglers had promised that Marco and his wife would
travel by bus in Mexico to avoid the perils of the freight trains. But
Chiclet announced a change in plans.

"He told me we were supposed to go to Arriaga to catch The Beast, and we
would go to the border and Houston," Marco said. "I had heard all about
the train. I didn't want to go."

The Mexican smuggler went out, got drunk and didn't return until 4 a.m.,
Marco said. Instead of escorting his clients, Chiclet sent them to
Arriaga on their own. Marco and his wife were arrested on a bus when
immigration officials checked papers.

"It was the fault of the smugglers," Marco said. "They aren't trustworthy."

Smuggling is a major industry. Last year, Mexican authorities in Chiapas
discovered two tractor-trailers carrying a total of 500 Central
Americans, Indians and Chinese who had just crossed the Guatemalan
border. Smuggling fees for immigrants from Asia and Africa depend on
factors such as the length and risk of the trip and use of fraudulent
documents. Chinese migrants pay as much as $65,000 and Indians about
$25,000, according to U.S. border enforcement officials. If they cannot
afford to pay upfront, clients borrow from family and associates or work
off debts through indentured labor upon arrival in the United States.

The revenue from such valuable human cargo buys allies in government.

Mexican immigration investigators broke up a corruption ring last year
after arresting three frightened Indians at the Tapachula airport. The
Indians carried seemingly legitimate visas for Mexico but admitted their
intent to sneak into the United States, according to their statements
to Mexican investigators obtained by ProPublica.

A husband and wife named Nareshkumar and Urbilaben Patel explained that
everything was arranged before their departure. They left Delhi for
Dubai, where they spent a month and then flew via Amman and Madrid to
Guatemala City. After the Indians were smuggled across the Suchiate
River by raft, a Mexican lawyer gave them documents and told them to
pose as tourists, according to the statements.

Investigators arrested the lawyer, a former state prosecutor from
Tabasco who obtained fraudulent visa papers from accomplices in the
immigration bureaucracy in Mexico City. The ex-prosecutor was charged
with smuggling and the officials were fired, authorities said.

The smuggling flow changes rapidly. Mexico detained 723 Eritreans in
2010, that year's largest group of illegals who were not from Latin
America. This year has brought a fourfold increase in Cubans: 2,593 so
far. Farther south, the numbers are similar. In Panama, a gateway for
migrants arriving from South America, authorities arrested 2,117 Cubans
in the first 10 months of the year, a fivefold rise. Many Cubans come
through Ecuador, where visa policies are lax, according to U.S. and
Mexican officials.

Cubans speaking melodious Caribbean Spanish congregate in the patio of
the federal immigration detention center in Tapachula. A muscular,
gray-eyed young man from the town of Bayamo explains that he voyaged on a
makeshift vessel to Honduras. He waited and worked odd jobs for a year,
when his absence from Cuba meant he had legally renounced citizenship.
His goal is to join relatives in Hialeah, Fla. He chose the route
because U.S. refugee law favors Cubans who arrive at a land border.

"If I arrive in a raft in Miami and the Coast Guard catches me at sea, they deport me right back, chico,"
said the young Cuban, who asked not to be identified because of his
migratory situation. "Matamoros, Mexico, that's where I want to go."

The repercussions of the evolving smuggling patterns bubble up at the
U.S.-Mexico border as well. During a hectic period in March of last
year, one in four migrants arrested in the Border Patrol's Rio Grande
Valley sector in south Texas were non-Mexicans.

Several recent cases have raised concerns about the potential for
terrorists or foreign intelligence operatives to tap into the smuggling
infrastructure. Last year, a Somali was sentenced to 10 years in prison
in Texas on immigration charges. Ahmed Muhammed Dhakane led a ring that
smuggled East Africans to the United States via Brazil, Guatemala and
Mexico and admitted that he and some of his clients had links to Somali
terrorist groups, according to U.S. court documents. Dhakane boasted that he made as much as $75,000 a day smuggling Somalis, documents say.

In a case that startled law enforcement and intelligence agencies, an
Iranian-American pleaded guilty this year in federal court to a plot to
hire hit men from a Mexican cartel to assassinate the Saudi ambassador
to Washington. Intercepts and other evidence showed that the defendant
was working for Iranian intelligence chiefs, who provided $100,000 for
the plot. The Iranian agent lived in Corpus Christi, Texas, and traveled
back and forth frequently to Mexico, where he developed contacts among
drug traffickers, according to court documents.

Counterterrorism officials worry that extremist operatives could
establish a presence in Central America by taking advantage of porous
borders, the availability of fraudulent documents and mafias involved in
arms, drugs and people smuggling. Mexican intelligence works closely
with U.S. counterparts to aggressively target migrants from nations such
as Iran or Somalia with hostile governments or active terror groups —
Special Interest Aliens, in the parlance of U.S. border agencies.

Mexican officials tend to see the U.S. worries about terrorists as
exaggerated, however. In September, police in the city of Merida acting
at the request of U.S. officials arrested several suspects, including a
former California imam wanted for a U.S. parole violation and found that
he carried a fraudulent passport from Belize, which neighbors Guatemala
and Mexico, according to Mexican and U.S. officials. There were initial
suspicions that the imam and his Belizean associates had Hezbollah
links, but Mexican and U.S. officials subsequently downplayed that
aspect of the case.

U.S. officials say the larger intelligence picture justifies their
concerns, especially about a presence of Iranian and Hezbollah
operatives in Latin America.

A Mexican border patrol?

The detention center in Tapachula, run by Mexico's National Institute of
Migration, is the largest facility of its kind in Latin America. It
embodies the contradictions and challenges of the border.

The clean, modern complex has a capacity for 950 men, women and
children. The administrators look more like social workers than jailers.
It has a game room and a library, where a small cheerful boy plays on a
computer. The boy's mother is Eritrean; he is stateless, born in South
Africa during a yearlong odyssey that led through Brazil and Guatemala
before falling short of the destination: Chicago.

Mexican immigration officers are unarmed, enlisting federal and state
officers for support on investigations and operations as needed.
Although corruption and abuse are longtime problems in the immigration
service, it is not a border patrol or even a traditional police force.

At least in theory, Mexican immigration policy is driven by human rights
concerns. A new law passed last year spells out liberal policies toward
illegal immigrants in Mexico and places limits on enforcement.

In the United States, the changes at Mexico's borders will have an
impact on the immigration debate. After President Obama's re-election,
Republicans looking to court Latino voters have expressed new interest
in immigration reform. The Obama administration argues that the drop in
illegal crossings and the security buildup at the U.S. border have
established a framework for reform. But the changes at the Southwest
border have not necessarily sunk in among politicians and the public.

"Whether the perception has caught up with the reality is not clear,"
said Douglas Rivlin, chief spokesman for Rep. Luis Gutiérrez, D-Ill., a
leading proponent of immigration reform. "There's often a big gap
between what Congress is talking about and what the reality is. People
probably aren't aware the flow is so low."

One goal of immigration reform will be legal status for more Central
Americans, reducing the number of migrants who transit through Mexico,
Rivlin said.

"The goal is to have an immigration system in which people board a plane
in San Salvador and are not taking the risk of riding on top of a train
through Mexico," he said. "That's what gives the U.S. security; that's
what means less deaths on the border; that's what gives us one labor
market rather than several."

Just as the United States and Mexico work together more closely than
ever against drugs, there is unprecedented cooperation on border issues.
In the United States, representatives of Mexican consulates routinely
visit U.S. Border Patrol stations and are provided with office space to
attend to Mexican detainees. U.S. agents stationed in Mexico share
information in real time with Mexican aviation security authorities to
screen incoming passenger flights. Similar programs are expanding in
Central America.

Nonetheless, Mexican human rights advocates and politicians object to
measures such as Mexican police stopping Central Americans from riding
the freight trains, saying they do not want Mexico doing the dirty work
of the United States.

Mexico still suffers nagging inequality and crime. But last year's Pew
study cited the growth of the middle class, the decline in Mexican
immigration, lower birthrates and higher rates of literacy and
education. If those trends continue, Mexico seems headed toward a
transition that could spur social tension — and tougher border
enforcement policies

"Mexico is increasingly finding itself in the most complex situation for
a country in regards to migration: It is simultaneously a sending
country, a transit country and a receiving country," said Meissner of
the Migration Policy Institute. "Those are very different identities to
reconcile. They really have to build an infrastructure on that border."

The rise of Central America as a base for drug mafias adds pressure.
President Peña Nieto's aides have announced a plan for the southern
Mexican border featuring 10 new ports of entry and legal status for
Guatemalan laborers in Mexico's four southernmost states. The new
administration intends to create a Mexican border police of 5,000 to
8,000 officers to patrol areas between official crossings at the
Guatemalan border, officials said.

The mission of the new force will be to prevent the flow of "drugs, arms
and to a certain extent so people don't cross," said Arnulfo Valdivia,
immigration coordinator for the president's transition team, according
to a report in El Universal newspaper.

The extent to which this border patrol will intercept illegal crossers
remains to be seen. The plan is part of a larger security restructuring,
discussed during Peña Nieto's visit to Washington last week, that will
expand the role of Mexican federal law enforcement.

If the past is a guide, Washington is likely to contribute
border-related training, resources and technology to help Mexico and
Central American nations target organized crime, but will tread lightly
to avoid the perception that it is intervening directly in other
countries to block U.S.-bound migration. The U.S., European Union and
United Nations contribute to a number of initiatives to strengthen
security policy in Central America.

Politics aside, the obstacles to controlling Mexico's southern line are
daunting. The geography is rugged. Mafias overwhelm opponents with
firepower and corruption. There are other budget demands in Mexico, let
alone in Guatemala and its neighbors.

Experts say the strategy must be smart and targeted. An example: In
response to the surge of illegal migrants from India, most Central
American countries have stemmed the influx by imposing a visa
requirement on Indians.

The study by the Migration Policy Institute cautioned against a narrow
focus. Because mafias are often stronger than the state in the remote
border regions, reforms should focus on establishing the rule of law and
improving safety in those areas and not just at the international line,
the study said.

Mohar, the veteran Mexican official, calls for a regional approach that
addresses violence and poverty in Central America as well.

"Law enforcement and security are not enough," he said. "The truth is
that Central America is a small region where investment by the
international community, the United States and international entities
could be relatively low compared to the risk of not doing anything. The
border is an expression of problems that exist far from the border."

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